Hmm. Is that right? Well, it certainly is true that he has about the same amount of wit as a refrigerator. His carbrain would be quicker with repartee, if it only had a speaker. Yes, it’s true. Jim has never really thought of it this way before, but many’s the time when he’s recalled a funny conversation, Abe and Sandy and Tash jamming on one comic riff or another, and a great line to throw into the hilarious sequence will come to him!—only a week or so too late. A bit slow in that department, you could say.

Of course his friends are perfectly aware of this; now Jim sees it clearly. They’ll get on a jag and everyone’ll be laughing hard and Sandy will get that gleam in his eye and demand swiftly of Jim, “What do you say about that, Jimbo?” and Jim will conquer his giggling and puff and wheeze and blow out all his mental circuits trying to think of just one of the kind of witticisms that are flying out of his friends as natural as thoughts, and finally he’ll say something like, “Well … yeah!” and his three friends will collapse, howling like banshees. Leaving Jim grinning foolishly, only dimly aware that in a gang of wits a dorker can be more valuable than another quick tongue.

What joy it would be to convulse the crowd with an ad-libbed one-liner, tossed into a long sequence of them! But it’s not something Jim, Mr. Slow, has ever managed. He’s just a convulsee, a one-man audience, the great laugher; when they get Jim going they can drive him right to the floor with laughing, he gasps and chuckles and screams and beats the floor, stomach muscles cramping, Sandy and Tash and Abe standing over him giggling, extemporizing one comic theme or another, Sandy saying “Should we kill him right now? Should we asphyxiate him right here on the spot?”

Sigh. It’s been a long night. Partying can be damned hard work. And rather disturbing as well.

Mr. Dull walks in the door of his little ap just before dawn. In the gray light it looks messy, stupid. Books in the city built tomorrow. Sigh. Go to sleep.

Chapter 28

28

But he hasn’t been sleeping for long when he wakes to the sound of Virginia Novello coming in the door.

“What are you doing, still sleeping?”

“Yeah.” Didn’t she give her key to his place back to him last week? Throw it at him, in fact?

“Christ, this place is a mess. You are so lazy.” She sits on the bed hard, rolls him over.

“Hi,” he says fuzzily.

Kiss on the forehead. “Hello, lover.”

And suddenly he is in the world of sex. Virginia gets up, turns on his bedroom video, undresses, climbs into the rumpled bed with him. He watches the screens goggle-eyed.